The station's call letters, which are said to represent a "new era in broadcasting", are shared with NPR member station KERA (90.1 FM); while there is cross-promotion between the two stations, each operates their own pledge drives.

KERA-TV began its life as a broadcasting arm of the Dallas Independent School District and was developed by local nonprofit Area Education Television Foundation, Inc. (which later evolved into North Texas Public Broadcasting), in cooperation with the district.[2] The district paid the station to carry instructional telecourses that it would produce for broadcast on channel 13. Southern Methodist University originally applied for the channel 13 allocation in the late 1950s, but had trouble raising enough funds for its start up costs. DISD superintendent W. T. White announced in October 1958 that the station was expected to sign on the air by the beginning of the 1959-60 school year, with programming to include Spanish language instructional programming for area elementary school students.[2] The foundation had difficulty in meeting its fundraising goals to start broadcasting; by May 1959, the foundation was said to be $265,000 short of its $890,000 target to cover the proposed station's first two years of broadcasting.[3]

KERA 13 ident used until 2000.

KERA's early operation benefited frequently through help from the commercial broadcasters in the Metroplex. The station's original license application had received permission by the Federal Communications Commission to broadcast from Fair Park (on land donated to the station by the Dallas city government), but in 1960 the station applied to be permitted to broadcast from studios on Harry Hines Boulevard[4] that were set to be vacated by ABC affiliate WFAA-TV (channel 8), which was building new studio facilities at Young and Houston Streets to accommodate the operations of WFAA-AM-FM-TV as well as those of local newspaper The Dallas Morning News (ironically, WFAA-FM once held the KERA-FM calls now used by channel 13's radio sister);[5] the building on Harry Hines, which the Dallas Independent School District purchased for $400,000, had been used by WFAA from its sign-on (as KBTV) in 1949.

KERA-TV signed on the air on September 14, 1960. It temporarily operated from studios at the Davis Building in downtown Dallas, behind the original WFAA building, in two portable buildings that were made to resemble a schoolhouse; KERA migrated its operations to the Harry Hines Boulevard facility in April 1961. It used the original WFAA-TV transmitting facility until it moved its transmitter to a tower at Cedar Hill that is shared with KTVT (channel 11); the station's transmitter only covered Dallas and surrounding suburbs, until a new transmitter was installed on August 31, 1970 that expanded KERA's signal coverage into Fort Worth. In 1974, KERA became the first television station in the United States to broadcast episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and is often credited with introducing the program to American audiences.[6]

KERA parent North Texas Public Broadcasting signed on a secondary PBS member station in the market, KDTN (channel 2), on September 1, 1988. KERA used the station primarily to run educational and instructional programming that had previously filled much of the station's daytime schedule. KERA then shifted to offering primarily entertainment programming from PBS and other public television distributors. KERA sold KDTN to religious broadcaster Daystar – which bought the station in order to get a better signal in the market, selling its original flagship KMPX (channel 29, now an Estrella TVowned-and-operated station) in turn – in 2004. However, through a special arrangement, KERA announced plans to continue its digital programming on KDTN's digital signal, in order to free up bandwidth on KERA's main digital signal to allow the station to upgrade to high definition broadcasts. However, KERA has not needed additional subchannel bandwidth from KDTN as it operates only one additional subchannel service outside of its main signal.

Prior to the sign-on of KERA's Wichita Falls translator, it had a unique arrangement to distribute its programming to the area, which was one of the few areas of Texas (and the United States, as a whole) without a PBS station of its own. A group headed by longtime State Representative Ray Farabee launched KIDZ-TV on UHF channel 24 in 1973; the station maintained a full-power license, but operated at an effective radiated power of only 2.82 kilowatts.[7] Before the expansion of cable television into the area, the goals were simple; among them, to make the popular children's program Sesame Street available to Wichita Falls (at the time, it was standard for PBS to offer programs to commercial stations in areas without their own PBS stations, but for whatever reasons none of thethreestations in the Wichita Falls-Lawton market were interested). The local group had planned to apply for and build a translator. At the time, translators were only allowed to use signals picked up off the air, and KERA's signal was marginal at best in that part of North Texas.

KIDZ-TV shared tower space with Wichita Falls CBS affiliate KAUZ-TV (channel 6). It rebroadcast KERA-TV during all of the hours that KAUZ was on the air, roughly between 6:00 a.m. and midnight. This meant that some specials that aired on weekends were cut off early when the KAUZ engineers (who tended channel 24 as a public service) went home.

By the late 1970s, FCC rules regarding translators were changed to allow the microwave feed to be used to feed the translator class of station. KERA was therefore able to build its own translator in Wichita Falls, also on channel 24, as K24AD. The translator provided a better picture, and could operate during all of the hours that KERA was on the air. It moved to UHF channel 44 in 2005 and changed its callsign to K44GS. In September 2009, the FCC granted the station a construction permit to convert its signal to digital; the permit remained valid until September 2012 (the current occupant of channel 24, K24HH-D, is unrelated to K24AD or the earlier KIDZ-TV).[8]

In October 2009, North Texas Public Broadcasting applied to the FCC for a translator license in Tyler. The application requested a license for the station to operate on UHF channel 25.[9] The application was dismissed in March 2011.[10] Two additional applications are still pending for UHF channels 35 and 44, but no apparent actions have been taken on these applications to date.[11][12]

In 2003, KERA-TV signed on its digital signal on UHF channel 14. The station shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 13, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its transition period UHF channel 14,[14] using PSIP to display the station's virtual channel as its former VHF analog channel 13.

This section requires expansion with: the history of KERA-TV's news operation. (May 2014)

On February 16, 1970, KERA-TV became one of the earliest educational television stations to establish a news department, and began to air a 6:00 p.m. newscast titled Newsroom, which was based on a similar program that aired on PBS's San Francisco member station KQED. In October 1976, the program was relaunched as a primetime newscast at 9:00 p.m., predating the move of then-independent stationKTVT (channel 11, now a CBS owned-and-operated station)'s late evening newscast to the 9:00 p.m. timeslot in August 1990. The station moved its evening newscast two hours earlier to 7:00 p.m. on January 31, 1977, and renamed the program as 13 Report the following month. KERA shut down its news department in September 21, 1977.